Derek Walcott

Poet

• Born: January 23, 1930
• Birthplace: Castries, St. Lucia, West Indies
• Died: March 17, 2017
• Place of death: St. Lucia

Biography

Derek Alton Walcott is one of the most highly regarded poets to have written in English, let alone from the English-speaking Caribbean. His prodigious talent and energy were recognized early in Castries, St. Lucia, and his mother, Alix Walcott, encouraged him, his older sister, and his twin brother, Roderick Walcott (also an accomplished playwright), in their art. Their father, Warwick Walcott, wrote and painted watercolors as an avocation; he died at age thirty-five when the twin brothers were one year old. Derek Walcott won numerous awards and fellowships for his writing, among them the Welsh Arts Council International Writers Prize (1980), the John D. and Catherine MacArthur Foundation Prize (1981), the Los Angeles Times Book Award (1986) for his Collected Poems, 1948–1984, the Queen’s Gold Medal for Literature (1989), the St. Lucia Cross (1993), the Nobel Prize in Literature (1992), and the T. S. Eliot Prize (2011). He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (1966) and an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1979).

Walcott attended St. Mary’s College in Castries and the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, earning a BA in English, French, and Latin in 1953. With his mother’s financial help, he published his first volume of poems in 1948. His first play, Henri Christophe, was produced in 1950 by the student drama society at Jamaica. He taught Latin and other subjects in Grenada, St. Lucia, and Trinidad until 1959, when he founded the Little Carib Theatre Workshop (later known as the Trinidad Theatre Workshop). He worked with the company until 1976, writing many of his most important plays for actors he had trained. Among the plays premiered there were Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1958), Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967; won an Obie Award in 1971), The Joker of Seville (1974), and O Babylon! (1976). In that same period, he finished six volumes of poetry, including Another Life (1973), the book-length autobiographical poem that, like William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1850), chronicles the growth of the poet’s imagination.

In the late 1970s, Walcott taught at Yale, Columbia, Harvard, and New York universities before accepting a full-time post at Boston University in 1981; after 1985, this became a visiting professorship. Dividing his time between teaching in the United States and living in St. Lucia and Trinidad permitted the division within his African and European heritage (which he defined in “A Far Cry from Africa” and other early poems) to be elaborated in terms of the metropolitan state and the developing islands. The placing of his poetry in both halves of the New World reveals an ambitious effort to bring into creative tension the conflicts of his divided life as a part-black and part-white man of the postcolonial world of the Americas. That effort is mounted in a literary context. Thus his poetry draws upon the tradition within which he located his work, that of Andrew Marvell, John Milton, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Traherne, John Donne, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, William Butler Yeats, and many others, including Robert Lowell and especially Homer, whose works underlie Walcott’s best-known work Omeros (1990)—as well as in a historical context of a postslavery, postcolonial society.

The racial and political ironies of Walcott’s West Indian situation are also the subject of his plays from the late 1970s, Remembrance (1977) and Pantomime (1978). In the latter, a white Englishman and a black calypsonian from Trinidad exchange places in rehearsing a music-hall version of Robinson Crusoe, in which Crusoe is black and Friday is white. They play out their oppositions to reach a relationship that is nearly brotherhood, though Crusoe has to ask Friday for a raise.

Walcott has both been criticized for writing a self-indulgent, highly wrought poetic line and praised for a line that is Elizabethan in grandeur and richness. Some critics have accused him of betraying the very people his poetry should speak to and for: the indigent, Creole-speaking West Indian who likely cannot read the poetry that Walcott wrote. Such critics favor Jamaican “dub” and reggae-based poetry, but they misconstrue the importance of the Trinidadian calypso in Walcott’s work, and indeed in the East Caribbean. Walcott the lyric poet and narrative poet was also a dramatic poet, and his plays and poems elucidate each other. A thorough assessment of Walcott’s work cannot be made without integrating the poet and playwright with the painter who swore on his eighteenth birthday to put his island into paint and words and who was admirably successful at the task for decades. His ability to paint these images so lyrically in words was recognized by his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. The prize brought attention to West Indian writers in general. Walcott’s best work may be those poems, such as Another Life, that, whatever the foregrounded subject, take as their realm the villages of St. Lucia—Anse La Raye, Dennery, Choiseul, Gros Islet, Vieuxfort, Soufriere, and the city of Castries—and the spectacular forests, mountains, and seas of the Caribbean.

Since 2004, Walcott published several volumes of poetry, including The Prodigal (2004), Selected Poems (2007), the award-winning White Egrets (2010), and The Poetry of Derek Wolcott 1948–2013 (2014). During this time he also wrote two plays, Moon-Child (2012), which takes place in St. Lucia, and O Starry Starry Night (2014), about the friendship between the famous painters Paul Gaugin and Vincent van Gogh. In the fall of 2015, he was honored with the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry's Lifetime Recognition Award. His final work was a collaboration with friend and painter Peter Doig titled Morning, Paramin (2016). In this format, Walcott's poems served as responses to Doig's artwork.

Walcott died on March 17, 2017, at his home in St. Lucia, at the age of eighty-seven, following an undisclosed illness. He is survived by his partner, Sigrid Nama; a son; two daughters; and grandchildren.

Bibliography

Baer, William. Conversations with Derek Walcott. UP of Mississippi, 1996.

Bloom, Harold, editor. Derek Walcott. Chelsea House, 2003.

Bobb, June D. Beating a Restless Drum: The Poetics of Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott. African World Press, 1998.

Brown, Stewart, editor. The Art of Derek Walcott. Dufour, 1991.

Burnett, Paula. Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics. UP of Florida, 2001.

Davis, Gregson, editor. The Poetics of Derek Walcott. Duke UP, 1997.

"Derek Walcott's Guardian Aesthetic." Cross / Cultures: Readings in the Post / Colonial Literatures in English, vol. 171, 2014, pp. xi–xliii. Literary Reference Center Plus, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=tnh&AN=93668819&site=ehost-live&scope=site. Accessed 29 Dec. 2014.

Grimes, William. "Derek Walcott, Poet and Nobel Laureate of the Caribbean, Dies at 87." The New York Times, 17 Mar. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/03/17/books/derek-walcott-dead-nobel-prize-literature.html. Accessed 4 Apr. 2017.

Hamner, Robert D., editor. Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Three Continents, 1993.

Hamner, Robert D. Derek Walcott. Twayne, 1993.

Heaney, Seamus. “An Authentic Poetic Voice that Bridges Time, Cultures.” Boston Globe, 9 Feb. 1986, pp. 27–28.

King, Bruce. Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama. Clarendon, 1995.

King, Bruce. Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life. Oxford UP, 2000.

Mason, David. "The Fame of Derek Walcott." Hudson Review, vol. 67, no. 3, 2014, pp. 505–13. Literary Reference Center Plus, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=99202439&site=ehost-live&scope=site. Accessed 29 Dec. 2014.

Nwosu, Maik. "Derek Walcott and the Idea of Postcolonial Globalization." Critical Insights: Cultural Encounters, 2012, pp. 216–30. Literary Reference Center Plus, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=83406899&site=ehost-live&scope=site. Accessed 29 Dec. 2014.

Ross, Robert L., editor. International Literature in English: Essays on the Major Writers. Garland, 1991.

Terada, Rei. Derek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry. Northeastern UP, 1992.

Thieme, John. Derek Walcott. St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

Tynan, Maeve. Postcolonial Odysseys: Derek Walcott's Voyages of Homecoming. Cambridge Scholars, 2011.

Walcott, Derek. Another Life: Fully Annotated. L. Rienner, 2004.

White, J. P. “An Interview with Derek Walcott.” Green Mountain Review, vol. 4, no. 1, 1990, pp. 14–37.